Levels of study

All life forms on earth are totally dependent on water. In plants it generally constitutes 80–90% of herbaceous tissues and over 50% of woody tissues. In seeds and spores the content may drop to 20% or below although ultimately desiccation tends to kill even seeds as some residual metabolism is required to maintain viability. Indeed, in the case of the so called ‘recalcitrant’ seeds (e.g. acorns) this minimum can be quite high. On the other hand the dormant stages of some plants (the cryptograms) can withstand total desiccation. The biophysics of these that allows such behaviour is far from understood.

Water plays diverse physical and chemical roles in plants. Meidner & Sheriff classify these into processes that involve structural, physical (such as translocation) and metabolic processes. The varied physical processes that involve water have been grouped into a class of phenomena that have been termed water relations.

The water relations of plants may be studied over a range of levels. These extend from the biophysical role of water at the molecular level to the global role of water in weather systems in agriculture and plant communities. At one extreme the focus is at atomic resolution, at the other the focus of resolution may be intercontinental. The often conflicting importance of water to agriculture and industry in areas of the world deficient in the commodity (not all of them poor by any means) has recently increased interest and effort towards an understanding of the role of water in plant life.

The development of the modern American West dates from the midnineteenth century, when waves of frontiersmen, confronting what seemed a Great American Desert at the 98th meridian, leapfrogged across half a continent to the Pacific coast in response to the electrifying news of gold in California. From there, the newcomers quickly spread into other resource-rich areas of the region before gradually moving into the vast interior, where they joined with migrants from the East, Europe, and elsewhere to settle the intermountain plateaus and Great Plains. By 1890, there was no longer a discernible frontier line, and the stage was set for the phenomenal growth of the twentieth-century West. During the last century, the 17 contiguous western states and Alaska have moved from backwater status to world leaders in the development of large-scale mechanized agriculture and scientific stockraising, mineral extraction technologies, aerospace and electronic industries, massive multipurpose public works projects, banking, motion picture and television industries, and tourism. Growth in the American West, although uneven over the last century and a half, has been spectacular nearly everywhere. The greatest and most cosmopolitan population development has occurred in the urbanized areas along the Pacific coast and in the Sun Belt cities of the Southwest. By the mid-1980s, the West had some 70 million residents, raising it to coequal status with the nation's other regions. At the same time, the West, while very urban, remained the most rural U.S. region, with 747 million acres (one-third of the nation's land area) available for agriculture and an additional 690 million acres in government ownership as national parks, forests, monuments, wilderness areas, mineral reserves, Indian reservations, fish and wildlife preserves, and grazing land (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1984a; 1984b, pp. 12, 204, 657).

Introduction

Threats to the world's forests are evoking responses at all levels, from villagers organizing to protect their woods to international summit meetings of world leaders. Many articles, books, and films have been produced documenting forest losses and the many threats – from peasant farmers, fuelgatherers, ranchers, herders, large-scale development projects, multinational companies, and atmospheric pollution. This book is different. It reports the results of an international research project that identified the impacts that governments, most of which are committed in principle to conservation and wise resource use, are themselves having on the forests under their stewardship through policies that inadvertently or intentionally aggravate the losses.

Such policies, by and large, were adopted for worthy objectives: industrial or agricultural growth, regional development, job creation, or poverty alleviation. But the study's important finding is that such objectives typically have not been realized, or have been attained only at excessive cost. The government policies identified in this book, both those usually identified as forestry policies and those impinging on the forestry sector from outside, have resulted in economic and fiscal losses while contributing to the depletion of forest resources.

Forestry policies, the terms on which potential users can exploit public forests, include harvesting fees, royalties, logging regulations, and administration of timber concessions with private loggers. Governments have typically sold off timber too cheaply, sacrificing public revenues and the undervalued non-timber benefits of the standing forest while encouraging rapid logging exploitation. The terms of many timber concession agreements and revenue systems have encouraged wasteful, resourcedepleting logging.

Background

The U.S. National Forest system includes 191 million acres of forest land, more than a quarter of the national total. Because timber production in the past drew more heavily on accessible, higher quality stands owned by private industry, the national forests contain a much higher fraction of standing sawtimber stocks, almost one-half. Much of this is mature, old-growth timber or grows on relatively low productivity sites, so despite a large increase in harvesting between 1940 and 1965, the national forests' contribution to annual net timber growth and harvest is more in line with their share in forest area. The national forests are also prime recreation areas, attracting more than 225 million visitor days of recreational use each year, almost ten times as many as in 1950. In addition, national forest lands have drawn increasing attention as potential repositories of significant mineral and energy resources.

These increasing and potentially conflicting demands have ensured controversies over forest management policies (Wilkinson and Anderson 1985). Often, these have arisen over attempts to restrict the multiple-use management principles employed by the U.S. Forest Service, or to reorient the application of those principles in favor of one or another specific use. A long-standing and sharp controversy of this nature has pitted recreational and conservationist interests against the Forest Service over timber harvesting and associated road-building in areas allegedly unsuitable for commercial timber production due to inaccessibility and relatively high growing costs. Many of the areas in question are either roadless tracts potentially eligible for restrictive wilderness designation, or in regions of recreational value. While the Forest Service defends its timber operations under broader measures of multiple-use benefits and costs, critics charge that they fall far short of recovering even their direct costs and should be curtailed.

Irrigation developed on the Texas High Plains using water from an exhaustible ground water resource (the Ogallala aquifer). Pumping from the Ogallala in this region has diminished the resource to the point that some areas have already made a transition back to rain-fed or dryland agricultural production. This transition from an intensive agriculture to an extensive one (irrigated to dryland) offers a unique opportunity for study in the United States, one that can provide lessons for other regions that eventually will face such a transition.

The focus of this case study is the implications of aquifer mining. They include impacts on agriculture, soil erosion, and present policy options most likely to effect a smooth transition to dryland farming considering minimizing long-term environmental degradation as well as political and economic feasibility.

Description of the region

The Texas High Plains is a nearly level to undulating semiarid region that includes approximately 35,000 square miles in 42 counties. Average annual rainfall ranges from 14 to 21 inches, and the growing season varies from 180 to 220 days. Elevation ranges from 3,000 to 4,000 feet above sea level.

The major soil resource areas include the hardlands (54 percent of the total), composed of fine-textured clays and clay loams, such as the Pullman and Mansker series; the mixedlands (23 percent of the total), composed of the medium-textured loams and loamy sands, such as the Portales, Olton, and Amarillo series; and the sandylands (23 percent), composed of the coarse-textured sands, such as the Brownfield and Tivoli series (Godfrey, Carter, and McKee, 1967).

A new era in water resources is being proclaimed by those who study and those who participate in water policy. (See, for example, Anderson, 1983; Weatherford and Brown, 1982). Water policy has moved from a period of water resource development to a new age of water management. Instead of building new sources of water supply to meet new demands, existing supplies will be made to serve through a reallocation from low- to higher-value uses and greater efforts at water conservation. The market system is supposed to play a much larger role in the emerging era. Increasing water prices will cause conservation and encourage the sale of water from less productive to more productive water rights holders.

Arizona in general and Tucson in particular provide an opportunity to test against reality the extent to which a new age in water has already dawned and the degree to which the vestiges of previous patterns of decision making and policy continue. The previous era of water development was driven by an overwhelming commitment to growth and development in the West (Wiley and Gotlieb, 1985; Fradkin, 1984). But has the attraction of expansion subsided as water officials turn from construction to management?

The era of development was criticized for its large environmental externalities that drowned free-flowing streams and buried beautiful and irreplaceable canyons under reservoirs. Whether contemporary water management in Arizona is more environmentally sensitive remains to be seen. In the age of water development, beneficiaries seldom paid the costs of development. Key to this analysis is whether the beneficiaries of water policy in Arizona now pay the costs or whether costs are still consigned to an unaware public and future generations.

From any close look at the major demands on western water resources emerges a sense of the inevitability of conflict. Evidence of pressure on water is everywhere. Most streams and rivers in the West have been fully appropriated. Salinity and toxic elements threaten traditional agricultural practices and impose high costs on subsequent water users. Groundwater tributary to a watercourse cannot usually be tapped unless equivalent surface flow rights are retired, and nontributary groundwater is being mined at high rates. In fact, use exceeds average streamflow in nearly every western subregion, and the deficits are being offset with groundwater and water imported from adjoining basins. (See Figure 9.1.)

Several major southwestern cities, including Tucson, are now mining groundwater aquifers to meet everyday demand. Reliable yields from these sources are falling, and economic exhaustion of the resource will soon be approached. Other cities, such as Los Angeles, face a reduction in long-held supplies as upstream states claim their compact-apportioned shares of Colorado River water. As cities attempt to increase supplies to meet growing demands, instream flows may be diminished and water use in other offstream sectors may be threatened politically, if not legally. Conflicts over water supplies and water-quality degradation are not limited to a particular state; they thrive in every state in the West and even extend across state borders.

Although the focus in this volume is on water demand in the municipal and agricultural sectors, overall competition for western water has been growing as strong demands emerge in other sectors as well.

For many years China has suffered from an acute shortage of forest resources. According to the most recent data, based on a nationwide inventory completed in 1981, China has 115,277,000 hectares of forested land. This ranks China sixth in the world in total forest area, but in relation to China's large surface area and enormous population the resource is small. Only 12 percent of the country's surface area is forested, barely half the global average of 22 percent. China has only 0.12 hectares of forested land per capita, just 18.5 percent of the worldwide average of 0.65 hectares. Table 5.1 shows that timber inventories and reserves are equally scarce. China has 10.26 billion cubic meters of reserves (only 9.03 billion if marginal stands are excluded), an average of only 10 cubic meters per capita, or 15 percent of the global average (Table 5.1).

China's paucity of forest resources has hampered the country's economic progress, forcing industry to use substitutes or simply to do without. The country's paper and paperboard production, for example, falls well short of demand despite rising output and suffers from poor quality because three-quarters of domestic output is not based on wood pulp. Industry is subject to stringent guidelines, codified and strengthened in 1983, to minimize wood used in construction, public utilities, transportation, mining, furniture manufacturing, packaging, and other sectors, in favor of brick, concrete, plastics, and other substitutes (Regulations for Economic and Rational Application 1983).

One response to the shortage of forest products has been an increase in imports to over 9 million cubic meters a year in 1985 (Table 5.2).

Background

Water management issues have fundamentally shaped the laws, political and social institutions, economy, and culture of the residents of the Denver area since its beginnings. Denver was founded where two streams meet in the semiarid South Platte valley and has since spread outward to occupy the juncture between the water-scarce High Plains to the east and the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains to the west.

Since permanent settlement began in 1859, the successive waves of occupants – miners, irrigation farmers, and later residents of a complex urban service and trade center – have fought to conquer and shape the natural environment to their needs. Land, water, and minerals have been taken where they could be found and exploited to their full, and new resources sought in more distant searches. The values of this society have been those of achievement through aggressive struggle to create and mold an improved environment that compensated for the inadequate environment that nature provided. The society has grown and flourished under an entrenched system of law, custom, and institutional culture that was formed by, and in turn protects, traditional values.

These values are now being challenged by continued growth. Many people now recognize that the growth that has sustained economic vitality is increasingly costly to support because the resources that fuel growth are scarcer and more distant. Another challenge is an awareness that growth itself reduces amenities of life and fouls the environment.

As dissatisfaction intensifies over the conditions of life in the Denver area, an area still considered attractive although no longer ideal, the values that have sustained growth and prosperity are increasingly attacked.

Background

The Colorado River is the major surface water resource of the Southwest. In spite of John Wesley Powell's forecast that the region would never be useful or inhabited, the river basin has been fought over and romanticized more than any western river. Certainly, it has been the subject of more writing – from geomorphology to politics – than any other western river. Nadeau (1950) wrote of the Owens Valley controversy and of the heroic attempts to conquer the Lower Colorado River. Terrell (1965) described in detail the political battle between Arizona and California over the waters of the Lower Basin, and Fradkin (1968) touchingly described the great changes in the river that have come about through human attempts to control and harness its forces. Throughout this history, the influence of the financial power and the concentration of political power on water issues have dominated the policy scene, and since passage of the Reclamation Act of 1902, the federal government through the Bureau of Reclamation has been the agent of project construction and water supply provision.

The Upper Basin has grown more slowly than the Lower Basin – a typical pattern for development for river basins – generally owing to the superior climate, soils, and accessibility of the Lower Basin. Because the Colorado River's waters are produced primarily by snowmelt in the mountains of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah, this uneven growth pattern has created a pattern of mutual fears between Upper and Lower basins, the former fearing that the latter would establish title through early use, the latter fearing the former might eventually develop to a point at which it would be using much of the river's water.

The conflicts and control of water in California have been the source of political careers, personal fortunes, and Hollywood movies. Water has characteristics of both public and private property. Over the past century, water management and development have shifted from small local institutions to predominately large public agencies. The impetus for changing institutions came from physical, economic, and technical shifts; the implementation was manifest political power.

This chapter presents a brief overview of the physical and economic characteristics of California's Central Valley, followed by a historical overview of economic development in the valley, including water law and the major actors in the development and management of water. Emerging problems in the Central Valley water industry are then presented, and the policy solutions to these problems are developed. These conclusions lead to the prediction that California's water institutions are about to change substantially again.

Physical and economic setting

Hydrologically, the Central Valley is divided into three basins, the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Tulare Lake, based on the drainage areas of rivers and streams. In their unimpaired state, all Central Valley rivers drained to the ocean through the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay. Owing to reservoir and aqueduct construction, the Tulare Lake Basin is closed, with outflows occurring only in extremely wet years.

Interbasin transfers have concentrated on moving water from the northern half of the state, which receives 75 percent of the precipitation, to the southern half, which receives only 25 percent but contains two thirds of the population.

In the continental United States, the daily renewable supply of water totals about 1,400 billion gallons – 14 times what U. S. citizens consume per day. But national averages mask a central fact of American life: much of the western half of the country is arid or semiarid. Its rich greens would soon bleach to desert colors but for water pumped from aquifers or diverted from rivers by highly inventive, though sometimes extraordinarily expensive, means.

Geography may be destiny. Certainly, U.S. water riches are unevenly distributed. In the arid and semiarid West, annual water consumption averages 44 percent of renewable supplies. Everywhere else in the country, the average is 4 percent. This difference explains why rapid population and economic growth exerts particularly intense pressures in the West, why irrigation has become the lifeblood of western agriculture, and why water law and water allocation institutions are now being rattled to their foundations by the test of the times.

The American West is now living on borrowed water. Even discounting farfetched schemes to import water into the region from Canada, the West is using water faster than nature can replenish it. The borrowers are this generation, and the lenders the next.

Water-short or not, the West is still the place to go. Migration from other regions of the country and immigration from Mexico and other points south combine with rapid indigenous growth to make the western Sun Belt one of the fastest-growing regions in the United States.